Paga, one of the early payment platforms in Nigeria, has announced it is now fully integrated into Nigeria’s Banking System. This is according to Tayo Oviosu, the CEO and founder of Paga.

Explaining Paga’s mode of operation before the integration, Oviosu said that it took about two hours to verify a transfer. As a result, they had a lot of angry customers.

“When Paga launched to the public the only way to fund an account was either at a Paga agent or by visiting a bank branch to deposit to our bank account. If you used the second approach you had to notify us on our site. Two members of our team had to verify your deposit before we gave you electronic value. We termed this process “manual deposit”. We had 20 staff to make this manual deposit process work! It took us about 2hrs on average to process any deposit. Sometimes the banks didn’t post immediately, sometimes they didn’t post until evening. We could only give value when we saw money in our account. Other times we just had a major backlog. Either way, we had irate customers, and understandably so.”

Since this manual deposit process cannot be scaled, Paga had no choice than to work directly with banks.

Oviosu said that they started with 6 banks (including all major banks) adding that “Today, Paga is now connected to all banks in Nigeria. You can transfer money to your Paga account instantly, using your Paga 10 digit account number, from any bank in Nigeria. You can also transfer from Paga to any bank account in Nigeria instantly. This is a core foundation for the future.”